MEXICO CITY — President Enrique Peña Nieto came to power Dec. 1 with a swagger.
His Institutional Revolutionary Party, for all its faults, knew how to govern. He promised a new Mexico, an economic powerhouse far from its image as a violence-torn land overrun by drug traffickers. He passed reforms for education and telecommunications and proposed more for energy and taxes.
Nine months later, as he prepares to give his first state-of-the-nation address Monday, the new Mexico still looks a lot like the old one.
Economic-growth projections have been cut nearly in half. The streets are clogged with anti-reform protesters who have blocked Congress and even forced the president to change the date and location of his upcoming address.
Drug-related killings are down, his government says without releasing statistics. But kidnapping and extortion, the crimes affecting average citizens that Peña Nieto promised to reduce, are on the rise.
After 12 years out of office, the once-autocratic party known as the PRI is encountering a more complicated, democratic country than the one it ran for 71 years.
“They have to learn how to govern in a new context where there are a greater number of new voices from new spaces, and there is less control,” said Alberto Aziz Nassif, an analyst with the Center for Investigations in Social Anthropology.
With GDP growth projections dropping from 3.1 to 1.8 percent this year, and protesting teachers forcing legislators to shelve a key piece of his education reform, Peña Nieto canceled a trip to Turkey to rescue the meat of the education reform in Congress.
He worked during the campaign to convince voters that they were voting for a new PRI, devoid of the corruption and coercive tactics that got the party kicked out in 2000.
He was elected in July 2012 as an alternative to six years of the Felipe Calderon administration, which was marked by a bloody and divisive attack on organized crime and a legislative agenda in many ways similar to Peña Nieto’s that fell victim to a divided Congress.
“The mood was very hopeful for early, rapid and instantaneous change,” said Virgilio Bravo of the Technological Institute of Monterrey.
The PRI won the presidency but not majorities in Congress. So Peña Nieto touts as his first major achievement getting the three major parties to sign a pact to drive reforms in Congress. In his first month, he secured the constitutional amendments needed to launch the biggest change in the Mexican educational system in more than six decades.
But Peña Nieto’s administration didn’t seem to anticipate the power of a smaller, more radical teachers union adept at mobilizing people and immobilizing cities. Their protests of the last week paralyzed parts of Mexico City.
Failure to pass that measure would bode ill for Peña Nieto’s next, more controversial move: reforming the moribund state-owned oil company to allow private companies to explore and exploit Mexico’s vast oil and gas reserves.
“What we’re seeing is that the honeymoon doesn’t last forever and that, in the end, governing is a complicated exercise that requires a great ability to negotiate and establish relations with various political and social forces,” said Helena Varela, political sciences director at the Iberoamerican University.
